QUALITATIVE STUDIES IN EDUCATION, 2001, VOL. 14, NO.

5, 657 669

Toward an epistemology of a brown body

CINDY CRUZ
UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies
cruzc@ ucla.edu
In its current emphasis on all that is analytic and cognitive, the absence and elusiveness of the
body in educational research de nes and delineates any consideration of how new identities,
particularly the emerging identities of Latina/o lesbian and gay youth, are being invented
within a contestation of dominant discourses of race, class, gender, and sexuality. In a reevaluation of the writings of Chicana theorists Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldu a, this paper
locates the brown body as central in an ongoing practice of negotiation in which multiple,
often opposing, ideas and ways of being are addressed, appropriated, and negotiated. The
brown body, with its multiple and often oppositional intersections of sociopolitical locations,
must be acknowledged in its centrality in creating new knowledges. For the educational
researcher, understanding the brown body and the regulation of its movements is fundamental
in the reclamation of narrative and the development of radical projects of transformation and
liberation.

Preface
I have always thought that among my endless number of relatives I had the only
queer story to tell. No matter about the one in 10 statistic for lesbians and gay men
(homosexuals make up at least 10% of the population), I could not even imagine there
was another lesbiana in our family until the day of my grandmother s funeral.
It was at the funeral at the Mission San Gabriel where I began to think about the
women who have inspired me to continue with my education: my mother, grandmothers, aunts, and girl-cousins who have supported me through school, many of
whom have lived their lives around and for other women. It was at this funeral
where I rst heard the stories of my great-aunts and great-grandmother s who wore
men s clothing and fought in the revolution, only to come home to ght my greatgrandfathers. Our family story begins with a rape, a simple story. ` ` Your great-greatgrandmother went to the river, and the soldiers came and took her, says my
great-aunt Mary, whose daughter Tina, my prima, looks at me intensely, eyeing my
outlandishness, my shiny men s shoes and carefully tailored trousers, butch clothes
and walk. My prima Tina knows, I think to myself, but I know about her too. Will she
tell me about her desires so much like my own? In the unbearable heat of the midday
sun, I bow my head in prayer and my body betrays me in my grief.
Transgressions and trespassers, our grandmother rode across the border at midnight, a sleepy patroller waving her through Deming, New Mexico. She told me once
that she remembered the patroller and how easy it was to cross the border. ` ` You just
had to sign in and pay eight dollars, my grandmother told me, ` ` and I wasn t sure if I
should give him my real name. What for? There was nothing left for me in Durango; I
was never going to go back.
Internationa l Journal of Qualitativ e Studies in Educatio n ISSN 0951 8398 print/ISSN 1366 5898 online # 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/09518390110059874

658

cindy cruz

I remembered this conversation with my grandmother as I watched them lower

the casket into the familiar ground. And looking at my relatives standing in the treeshade at this 250-year-old cemetery, I saw women who were visible as lesbians, coatand-tie, hand-in-hand mujeres whose desire was de ned through other mujeres, young
dykes in boots and colored hair. I saw generations of queers. I walked in the procession
of my grandmother s body with the women of my family and saw my mother intimate
with her childhood friend a lesbian image. I saw women holding women, supporting
them, and I realized there have always been others like me we have always existed.
Our family has always made its commitment to its outlaws and to its queers. It is this
commitment to women that Barbara Smith (1980) calls ` ` inherently lesbian. Our
research is also a commitment to women, inherently ` ` queer, a compiling of their
lesbian stories.
Sitting in that auditorium chair was the rst time I had realized to the core that
for years I had disowned the language that I knew best ignored the words and
the rhythms that were the closest to me. The sounds of my mother and aunts
gossiping half in English, half in Spanish while drinking cerveza in the
kitchen. And the hands I had cut o the hands in my poems. But not in
conversation; still the hands could not be kept down. Still they insisted on
moving. (Moraga, 1983, p. 56)
Reclamation, for the Chicana social agent, is not only a strategy to make visible
Chicana voices and histories, but is also the struggle to develop a critical practice
that can propel the brown body from a neocolonial past and into the embodiments of
radical subjectivities. When writer Cherr e Moraga presents the image of a body
without hands, a symbol of her struggle for a language and an authenticity that
can encompass the complexity of a Chicana lesbian experience, she nds her rationale
for knowledge dismembering the women in her poems. Just as Chicana and other
border tongues are de-legitimized, so is the embodiment of that discourse. But it is the
author s body that is the constant reminder that knowledge ` ` fully saturated with
history and social life (Harding, 1991) is a possibility, a knowledge that refuses to
be ` ` kept down. In this sense, the Chicana social agent insists on moving forward with
ways of knowing that will not only legitimize the narratives of the women in our
families, but is also a movement toward standpoints that will challenge the censure
of the brown body.
How does a brown body know? Like Patricia Hill Collins s (1990) assertion that
the negation of African-American women s e orts in traditional genres of knowledge
has forced women to create and develop alternative spaces and methodologies for the
study of their communities, Chicana educational researchers and cultural workers
have also constructed spaces for the production of knowledges speci c to our own.
In this way, the brown body must be made central in any consideration of an epistemology of women of color; it is essential that an epistemology of Chicana critical
thought must be grounded in the histories of the Third World women s movement
that produced the backbone of women s presses and created the foundational texts of
This bridge called my back (1981) and Hacienda caras (1990). For this paper, I am
suggesting that our production of knowledge begins in the bodies of our mothers
and grandmothers, in the acknowledgement of the critical practices of women of
color before us. The most profound and liberating politics come from the interrogations of our own social locations, a narrative that works outward from our speci c
corporealities. ` ` For silence to transform into speech, sounds and words, it must rst

toward an epistemology

659

traverse through our female bodies, writes Gloria Anzaldu a (1990, p. xxii). It is, in
my opinion, the contemplation of the body that is essential in the development and
evaluation of an epistemology of Chicana thought and culture.

Reason and the body

If the body is an un- or inadequately acknowledged condition of knowledges,
then the sexual speci city of bodies must be a relevant factor in the evaluation of
these knowledges. (Grosz, 1995, p. 26)
The absence of the speci c physicality of the body in feminist theory reminds us that
even when feminists have consistently contested the argument that the functions and
the activities of the mind are somehow more t than those of the body, we as educational researchers nd ourselves entrenched in the Cartesian dichotomy of public/
private and theory/experience. Never mind our rallying cry that the personal is political, the sets of sanctioned attitudes and behaviors in the social sciences that emphasize the mind over the body, such as the values of the rational, autonomous,
independent, isolated researcher, somehow dismiss corporeal approaches that validate
the lived experience of the body (Bordo, 1993; Jagger, 1983; Mohanram, 1999; Pillow,
1997; Tong, 1998). Texts that are ` ` messy, where experience is performed not
explained, texts about betrayal, desire, and shame, are narratives that are often dismissed, unread, and untheorized (Denzin, 1997). I can remember a particular incident in an ethnic studies faculty seminar discussing This bridge called my back (1983)
when a prominent male scholar held the book up in his hands and asked, where is the
theory in this text?
What does being a thinking subject, an intellectual, mean for a woman of color
from working class origins? It means not ful lling our parents expectations, it
means often going against their expectations by exceeding them. It means being
in alien territory and suspicious of the laws and walls. It means being concerned
about the ways knowledges are invented. It means continually challenging
institutionalized discourses. It means being suspicious of the dominant culture s
interpretations of ` ` our experience, of the way they ` ` read us. It means being
what Judy Baca terms ` ` internal exiles. (Anzaldu a, 1990, p. xxv)
In this case, theory becomes a bodiless entity, a concept and a framework whose
interests lie outside our social environments and that is una ected by the workings
of our everyday material realities. Under the postulation of a logico-scienti c inquiry,
the boundaries between the personal and the political are demarcated not only in an
evaluation of their validity as a narrative of truth or as a historical document, but also
in their potential to erode the foundations on which the society of cultural knowledge
depends. In this sense, the scholar in possession of a brown and lesbian body, or in this
case, the body inscribed as ` ` messy text, is not only disruptive to the canon, but is also
excessive in its disorderly movements and conduct. Nothing provokes the custodians of
normality and objectivity more than the excessiveness of a body.
For the Chicana educational researcher, our research and narratives become the
` ` messy texts of research and writing. Based on the standards of positivist inquiry, the
narratives of women of color are considered too corporeal, too colored, and sometimes
too queer to be considered publishable. When Cherr e Moraga states that the source

660

cindy cruz

of her political commitment is her sexuality ` ` el amor, el deseo academic boundaries and its regulation become political borders that leave these narratives (if they are
included at all) in the last weeks of a syllabus and marginalized as the occasional
special o erings in the university course catalogue. This forces scholars who ` ` read
these texts to comment on and produce theory in non-traditiona l spaces (SaldivarHull, 2000). The messy text of the body is made a political liability in our movement
toward a standpoint of Chicana critical practice.
Not only was the brain split into two functions but so was reality. Thus people
who inhabit both realities are forced to live in the interface between the two,
forced to become adept at switching modes. Such is the case with the india and
the mestiza. (Anzaldu a, 1987, p. 37)
Recognizing the multiple perspectives of truth and ways of knowing that acknowledge
the racialized and gendered histories of conquest and colonization of indigenous
peoples, mestizaje is the embodiment of the multiple, often oppositional , subject positions of Chicana/Latina lesbians. The notion of a mestiza consciousness, based on a
construction of mixed race histories and multiple cultural and political positions that
derive from the collision between colonial and indigenous oppositions, positions the
new mestiza as nothing less than ` ` a struggle of esh, a struggle of borders, an inner
war (p. 78). It is a recognition that the brown body, in its migrations between First
and Third Worlds, acts and is acted upon by the political and economic forces of
globalization. In this sense, the brown body becomes agent, witness, and provocateur.
As Emma Pe rez (1999) rightly suggests, Aztla n as the mythical homeland of Chicana/
os is no longer the imaginary space of poets but is esh, skin, and bones. The mestiza
body that is Aztla n is both material and imaginary, manifesting itself in the notion
that a body does to the land what the land does to a body. It is a place scarred
by history and struggle, yet engaged in building new cultures and new ways of
being. It is in this way that mestizaje becomes one strategy toward an epistemology
of the borderlands.
For Anzaldu a, the struggle for territorial control over the US/Mexico border that
becomes inscripted on the brown body, the ` ` 1,950 mile long open wound/dividing a
pueblo, a culture/running down the length of my body, (Anzaldu a, 1987, p. 2) is a
material reality, not only recon guring radical subjectivities, but also comprising the
impetus for the mitigation of racialized, classed, and queered intersections in the
production of new forms of agency and being. Aztla n becomes the very real point
of departure for the imaginary, although I will argue that this voyage is not toward
the West as Terry Eagleton (2000) suggests, but to a very di erent epistemological
destination.
The brown and lesbian body that traverses the First to Third World landscape is,
as Che la Sandoval (1995) so aptly describes, ` ` the activity of the trickster who practices subjectivity-as-masquerade , the oppositional agent who accesses di ering identity, ideological, aesthetic, and political positions (p. 221). In this way, the migration
of the mestiza body is dialectical, negotiating the transcultural space of our postFordist communities and equipped with the tactics and worldviews that are forced
to ever change and develop. ` ` Stretch or die, writes poet Donna Kate Rushin in the
foreword of This bridge called my back, emphasizing the urgency of embodying change in
the everyday realities of Chicanas and other women of color.
This project of mestizaje is not the production of a new binary or the displacement
of one meta-narrative for another. Anzaldu a s mestiza consciousness is a movement

toward an epistemology

661

toward divergent thinking an inclusive, plural, constantly shifting, suturing synthesis

of an epistemology that signals the rupture in the subject object duality that grounds
Enlightenment epistemologies. In this sense, mestizaje consciousness is not only asking
for improved rigor and care in using the logico-scienti c methods of inquiry but is also
an episteme of hybridity that allows a reading of liminal (or third) spaces and of the
methodology of those who occupy such spaces. However, care must be taken to insure
that we do not lock into a duel of oppressor and oppressed, but to learn to move
beyond the counterstance . ` ` The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and
not react, writes Anzaldu a (p. 79).
The gaping mouth slit heart from mind. Between the two eyes in her head, the
tongueless magical eye and the loquacious rational eye, was la rajadura, the
abyss that no bridge could span. Separated, they could not visit each other and
each was too far away to hear what the other was saying. Silence rose like a river
and could not be held back, it ooded and drowned everything. (Anzaldu a,
1987, p. 45)
Reason, and the methodologies of research that result from an uncritical and unmediated use of it, fragment the brown body. Anzaldu a s magical eye is speechless and
without language while the rational eye is verbose the separation of the mind from a
mute and silenced body. For that reason, I will argue that the writer is challenging the
postmodern notions that are embedded in issues of contingency and the fragmentation
of identity. The issue is not one of fragmentation for Anzaldu a but a resistance to the
mutilation of the mestiza body. This is a deliberate search for the possibilities of
narrative and theory mending and suturing a body complete. In this sense, the visceral and corporeal representation of the mestiza body in Anzaldu a s narrative problematizes the core of the ` ` transparent neutrality of ways of knowing to the objects
known (Grosz, 1995, p. 27). The image of la rajadura, or opening, is more than a call
for an unmediated objectivity or a challenge to reason itself, but also a critique of the
select ways that universal, (post)modernist narratives have been employed to privilege
certain groups over others.
The new mestiza copes by developing a tolerance for contradiction, a tolerance
for ambiguity. She learns to be an Indian in Mexican culture; to be Mexican
from an Anglo point of view. She learns to juggle cultures. She has a plural
personality. She operates in a pluralistic mode nothing is thrust out, the good
the bad and the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing abandoned. Not only does
she survive contradictions, she turns the ambivalence into something else.
(Anzaldu a, 1987, p. 79)
Brian Fay (1996) suggests that a multicultural philosophy of social science is an
ongoing practice of negotiation in which multiple, often opposing, ideas and ways
of being are addressed, appropriated, and negotiated. Unlike the dualistic thinking of
mind/body and subject/object, Anzaldu a s notion of the mestizaje is not only an
engagement in the methodology of social sciences that explores the way subjects
` ` positively respond to knowledge of, and interaction with, those who are di erent
(Fay, 1996, p. 239), but is also a ` ` mode of learning and a conception of knowledge
that may enhance the possibility of collectively constituted thought and action which
seeks to transform the relations of power that constrict people s lives (Simon and
Giroux, 1989, p. 196). Ultimately, I am suggesting that Anzaldu a s notion of the
mestizaje advances epistemological possibilities based on the narratives of racially

662

cindy cruz

gendered positionalities and collisions that posit the brown body against the grain of
(post)modernist ways of knowing. In this way, Anzaldu a o ers the education
researcher an alternative direction for the re-negotiation of dichotomies of dominant
systems of rationalization and positivism in new directions that could posit a convergence of the mind with the body.
The fragmented body
To be a mouth the cost is too high her whole life enslaved to that devouring
mouth. (Anzaldu a, 1987, p. 74)
The project of reclamation for the Chicana education researcher is twofold: rst,
reclamation must be asserted through a politics of di erence that emphasizes the
local and multiple subjectivities of communities that are recognized as participating
in a larger movement of participatory democracies. Second, a project of reclaiming
histories and narratives must be committed to exposing how systems of power have
privileged certain kinds of narratives that serve to undermine and invalidate others. In
Moraga s case, storying the brown body becomes problematic when our training as
writers, researchers, and cultural critics is complicit with the systems of power that
threaten to invalidate certain kinds of knowledges. Our struggle to legitimize the
stories of our theoretical mothers and grandmothers collide with our academic
` ` groomings. How do we make compatible what has been unrepresented using the
forms of positivism? How do we recon gure ourselves as witnesses when our observations of poverty and oppression include the communities of our families?
I would grow despairing if I believed, as Rosario Morales refutes, we were
unilaterally de ned by color and class. Lesbianism is then a hoax, a fraud. I
have no business with it. Lesbianism is supposed to be about connection. What
drew me to politics was my love of women, the agony I felt in observing the
straightjackets of poverty and repression I saw people in my own family in.
(Moraga, 1983, p. xiv)
Emma Pe rez (1999), in an answer to Gayatri Spivak s (1988) ` ` Can the subaltern
speak? suggests, ` ` if the subaltern could speak, would not desire be the subject of that
discourse? (p. 157). Certainly for Moraga, the interrogation of her identity as lesbian
lends itself to the possibilities of solidarity with women whose positions di er drastically from her own. Only through a mediation upon the bodies of women does
Moraga identify the nature of her own oppression and her privilege as a lightskinned woman and begin the much larger understanding of the brown body and
its exchange/use as a worker and cultural agent. It is desire, and the discourses that
de ne that desire, that leads Moraga to women and women s bodies where she is
subjected to and made cognizant of the social pressures that de ne the allowable use of
her own body. Here is skin ` ` darkened by desire (1983, p. 69), a body that not only
does what Yvonne Yabro-Bejarano (1991) argues ` ` displays the constructiveness of
race (p. 152), but is also a recognition that lesbianism directs Moraga toward a
greater understanding of sociopolitical oppression and, thus, solidarity.
Sometimes when I write, I feel I am drawing from the most silent place in myself
a place without image, word, shape, sound to create a portrait of la mechicana before the ` ` Fall, before shame, before betrayal, before Eve, Malinche,

toward an epistemology

663

~oles, the
and Guadalupe; before the occupation of Aztlan, la llegada de los espan
Aztecs War of Flowers. I don t know what this woman looks like exactly, but I
know she is more than the bent back in the elds, more than the assembly-line
ngers and the rigid body beneath him in bed, more than the veiled face above
the rosary beads. She is more than the sum of all these fragmented parts.
(Moraga, 1993, p. 72)
For Cherr e Moraga, reclamation begins with the body that houses multiple identities.
Each component of the brown body has its own story to tell the lesbian mouth, the
bent back in the elds, the dismembered daughter and its deconstruction is a necessary process of reclaiming and re-imagining the histories and forms of agencies of
women who are unrepresented and unheard. Unlike the deconstructive need to
explode a text in order to engage it, Moraga is not seeking a nonform or a destruction
of form, but is remaking a new form of identity/body a body that is ground in the
interrogation of its positionality, a speci city of history and location. In an example
from the poem ` ` For the color of my mother (1983, pp. 59 60), the author displays
her mother s body postsurger y to reveal the constructiveness of a body:
Finally stitched shut from hip to breastbone
an inverted V
Vera
Elvira
` ` Bodies do not only pass meaning along, or pass it along in their uniquely responsive
way, writes Susan Leigh Foster (1996, p. xi). ` ` They develop choreographies of signs
through which they discourse. . . . They narrate their own fate. In this case, the sign
of the inverted ` ` V of surgery on the body of Moraga s mother is a narrative
inscripted in the form of staples and sutures, a story of a woman, like many other
Chicanas and Latinas who are exploited for their labor, who has literally been worked
to death. The ` ` V for ` ` Vera/Elvira on the body is Moraga s attempt at naming the
life of her mother, linking the narrative of Moraga s burgeoning political consciousnes s
within the body of her mother. Only through the body s discourse does Moraga
rename and reconstruct the broken gure of the mother. Stitched shut and made
whole, Moraga remakes and rede nes the object-woman from mother/wife/worker
to that of subject-Vera/Elvira. The brown body of the mother is not only a critical
reading of the representation of fragmentation for Moraga s postmodern text. Unlike
other representations of fragmentation that disclose the uneasiness of plurality and
diversity, Moraga s use of the broken or dismembered body confronts this fear of
` ` miscegenation.
Huitzilopotchli is not my god. And although I revere his mother Coatlicue,
Diosa de la Muerte y La Vida, I do not pray to her. I pray to the daughter,
La Hija Rebelde. She who has been banished, the mutilated sister who transforms herself into the moon. She is la fuerza femenina, our attempt to pick up the
fragments of our dismembered womanhood and reconstitute ourselves. She is the
Chicana writer s words, the Chicana painter s canvas, the Chicana dancer s
steps. She is motherhood reclaimed and sisterhood honored. (p. 74)
Coyolxauhqui, the daughter of the Aztec mother of creation, is the sister dismembered
by the misogynist brother. ` ` Breast splits from chest splits from hip splits from thigh
splits from knee from arm and foot, writes Moraga (p. 73). Splitting the body a

664

cindy cruz

body already fragmented by multiple identities and subjectivities serves the purpose
of not only reinventing identities, but also deconstructing the discourses inscripted
upon the brown body the image of the bent back in the elds is inscribed with the
racialized discourses of capitalism, the lesbian mouth is marked as sexual and transgressive muchachitas bien criadas, good girls don t talk back. In this way, the deconstruction of the body may o er the possibility of revealing how identities are
discursively created and how the brown body is constructed through the narratives
and the social mores of our communities. Not only does Moraga s narrative establish a
way of knowing that begins with the carnality of the brown body, but it also begins
deconstructing the prevailing ideologies that mediate how race, class, gender, and
sexuality constitute Chicana identities.

Towards a Chicana critical practice of education

Passion is another story. It is to be written about but not with: for the essence of
all academic work on ` desire is to stay cool. (Williamson, 1986, p. 12)
One of our objectives in educational thought is the incorporation of the brown body in
the discussions about representation, social control, and the constructions of normality. The conspicuous absence and elusiveness of the body in educational research in its
` ` current xation . . . on the rational and the cognitive (Shapiro, 1994, p. 61), de nes
and delineates any consideration of how new identities, particularly the emerging
identities of Latina/o lesbian and gay youth, are being invented within a contestation
of dominant discourses of race, class, gender, and sexuality. The articulation of new
subjectivities amongst youth is an issue that can be restated as an issue of the containment of the body. Subsequently, we must ask how the brown body is regulated and
governed in schools and other social institutions. How does a regime of a given society
become inscripted onto the bodies of our youth? How do Chicana lesbian students
discursively make the Chicana lesbian body? As Peter McLaren (1993) justly states,
` ` only in this way can liberating pedagogies be developed that will enable students to
construct meanings that are lived in the body, felt in the bones, and situated within
the larger body politic in the form of public meta-narratives (as distinct from master
narratives) aimed at increasing social justice and emancipation (p. 277).
Understanding the brown body and the regulation of its movements is fundamental
in reclaiming narrative and developing radical projects of transformation .
The data I have collected are part of a larger ethnographic project on the construction of the queer body. My exploration of the brown body comes from my
experiences as a teacher and an HIV educator at alternative high schools and
youth centers in California. In this work with the mostly Latina/o lesbian, gay, and
transgender students, my interactions with young people not only come from workshops and seminars about queer voice and autobiograph y but also my interactions o site, where many of our social circles overlap past the school gates. I also keep a
teaching journal that helps me reevaluate community-building and writing activities
that document the issues which develop when ` ` storying the self (Goodson, 1998, p.
16), and records my own observations of the day-to-day activities of urban queer
youth spaces.
Brian Turner (1984), in his introduction to the text The body and society, writes that
the parallels between the idea of a regime or government of a body and the regime of a

toward an epistemology

665

given society are illustrated best using Foucault s (1981) notion of the body ` ` disorder. ` ` Disorders, in this case, are the ` ` cultural indicators of the problem of control
(Turner, 1984, p. 2), particularly within communities of color, women, and queers.
One example of ` ` disorder is the American Psychiatric Association s 1973 removal of
homosexuality as a pathology from the Diagnostic and statistical manual. In turn, homosexuality as a pathology was subsequently replaced by a new ` ` disorder Gender
Identity Disorder of Children that gave parents and social workers the right to
hospitalize and institutionalize young people whose bodies did not adhere to the
conventions of traditional masculinity or femininity (Sedgwick, 1993). Interestingly
enough, when reading the Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick article, ` ` How to bring your kids up
gay, one lesbian student in my classroom ` ` remembered visits and a brief period of
institutionalizatio n at a local research hospital as a 7-year-old child.
I remember being taken by my parents to a hospital and I knew it was because
there was something wrong with me, there was something wrong about being
this boy-girl that I was and I remember asking where s my ma, what did I do?
(Personal correspondence , 11/20/99)
Turner (1984) argues that the regulation of the body is closely bound with the control
of female sexuality and socialization (p. 3). In this case, the feminine body of the then
7-year-old student was judged in ` ` disorder according to the standards set by her
doctor and her parents. Although Foucault s notion of the body disorder seems to
a ect female students disproportionately , young lesbians and gay men who create
their own style of race and gender performance continue to defy those discourses
that maintain the social order. In another example at an alternative high school for
queer youth, students often receive con icting messages from school o cials when
volatile behavior seems to draw di erent and unequal treatments from school sta
and administration for the gay male student as opposed to the lesbian student.
` ` Josie a big girl, strong, butch, Latina publicly challenged another male
student today, she shook her sts at him, she pushed chairs over to get to him, it
was an awesome display of power. The lead teacher quickly suspended her from
school. I ve noticed that other male students who exhibit the same damn behaviors are given two or three chances and are rarely expelled from school. Double
standard for the lesbians. (Journal entry 10/30/95)
Instances of disruptive behavior by female (lesbian) students were much more regulated by the male administrators than those disruptive instances by (gay) male
students. In a blur of movement, ` ` Josie s body ` ` disordered the classroom space.
No longer docile, the butch body s ` ` disorderly conduct destabilizes the order of the
classroom, forcing the teachers to contain and reestablish control in their class space.
The lesbian body threatened the authority of the administration, and the teaching
sta made much of her bodily strength and her hands and sts. In the eyes of the
school s administration, the student ` ` Josie embodied irrationality and is reduced to
` ` hands and sts that turn into dangerous weapons as she threatens another student
who had been taunting her about her masculine body. The body, even in a space
created for lesbian and gay youth, is still contained within the parameters of its
(future) use, whether as worker, citizen, or its complicity with a racially gendered
social order. The punishments are thorough and swift for girls who stray outside of the
roles relegated for female bodies. Not only are the consequences harsh for the young

666

cindy cruz

woman of color but, in this instance when the social authority of the classroom breaks
down, it is the female body that becomes inscribed as hysterical, irrational, and
monstrous.
I walk in a sea of perfection
I am awed
Not brown enough
Not white enough
Not thin enough
Chicana poet Christine Soto s (2000a) ` ` 250 Pounds begins with a body that does not
` ` t into the categories that de ne ` ` normality. Queer amidst Chicanos, Chicana
surrounded by largely white lesbian and gay communities, and big in a society that
values thinness as beauty, Soto s excerpt positions the brown body in opposition to the
bodies of ` ` las Gu eras, not only as a position against the white standards of beauty,
but also against becoming silenced. In this way, Soto is transitioning into accommodating her multiple shifting subject positions occupied by her body and is also defying
the unspoken rules against speaking out about abuse:
How did I get here?
250 pounds of shame
Hiding from that which I would rather forget
Feeling disgust
Swallowing words with a side of fries and a Big Mac
This is what I was taught,
Mama told me it was something I shouldn t speak of
So I don t.
Even as she was instructed by the mother not to talk about her history of abuse, Soto
rejects the cultural constraints placed upon her to stay silent. In reconstructing the
memory of the trauma, Soto reconstitutes the experience, making sense of her own
history as a survivor, and begins the process of transformation . On one level, Soto s
poem can be read as a struggle against the unrealistic standards of beauty and body
image for young females in this society. On another level, the poem can be read as a
narrative of the body, where the language of the self is as substantial as esh, a body
that confronts the inscriptions of shame:
I eat and eat and eat
When the food goes down so does it
That is what las Gu eras can t see
That 250 pounds keeps it from coming out.
Majorie Orellana (1999) argues that narratives provide space where social identities
can be constructed. For Soto, not only is her poetry a critique of the racially gendered
discourses of dominant culture, but her writing is also a celebration of ambiguity and
of mestizaje. In her refusal to accept the dichotomy of genders and her acknowledgement of the collision of cultures between brown and white bodies, Soto begins the
creation of narrative that informs her struggle in situating her identity as butch and as
Chicana.
If you only knew what lies beneath
These slacks and dress shirt

toward an epistemology

667

A woman no longer afraid of what feels good

A woman no longer ashamed of her skin color
And slanted Mexican eyes
Once thought to be Chinese
A woman who no longer needs to wear
Fruit of the Loom boxer shorts to prove her butchness
A woman who has peeled layers of pain in silence
A woman who doesn t have to march in the dyke parade
To prove her pride
A woman, tired of assumptions and rejections
A woman who doesn t need to attend every Chicano Meeting
To validate her loyalty to la Raza
What lies beneath is,
Simplemente una Mujer en traje de hombre con chi-chis y Orgullo.
Soto s (2000b) poem ` ` If you only knew what lies beneath, is a celebration of reinventing an identity that has successfully negotiated the ambiguity of a body that is
neither male nor female, and its refusal to adhere to the cultural binaries of gender and
race. In this poem, the narrator has created the space where the body is at ease the
integration of the multiple subjectivities of racial identity and the performance of
gender outside of the boundaries of femininity. Soto is not refusing the speci city of
her body, but instead recenters and reframes the body as Chicana and as queer.
Where these identities once functioned as boundaries not to be crossed, Soto has
rejected the fragmentation that comes with the uneasiness that plurality and hybridity
make among dominant culture. In this sense, the body refuses the fragmentation that
comes from the boundaries of identities and is able to reorder the space around the
self.
When I write it feels like I m carving bone. It feels like I m creating my own
face, my own heart a Nahuatl concept. My soul makes itself through the
creative act. It is constantly remaking and giving birth to itself through my
body. (Anzaldu a, 1987, p. 73)
For Soto, the a rmation of her body as ` ` Simplemente una Mujer en traje de hombre
con chi-chis y/ Orgullo begins the process of ` ` resubjecti cation (Tanaka, 2000), a
fashioning of new ways of being in the world that recon gures and reconstructs the
body as whole. The mestiza narrative occupies multiple subject positions and multiple
voices. Not only is the creation of the mestiza narrative (or a critical story) only one
strategy used by young writers such as Soto, it is a methodology situated in the tension
of Reason and the body. For young Chicana writers like Christine Soto, writing is not
only a means of crafting the self. For the Chicana writer, it is narrative that makes the
word esh.
A queer conclusion
Picking out images from my soul s eye, shing for the right words to recreate the
images. Words are blades of grass pushing past the obstacles, sprouting on the
page; the spirit of the words moving in the body is as concrete as esh and as

668

cindy cruz
palpable; the hunger to create is as substantial as ngers and hands. (Anzaldu a,
p. 71)

I believe in the power of narratives. My seminars begin with critical stories about the
body. The body prompts memory and language, builds community and coalition. The
body is a pedagogical devise, a location of recentering and recontextualizing the self
and the stories that emanate from that self. The discourse of the Radical Right has
done such an excellent job of decontextualizing a narrative. ` ` South-Central L.A. teen
mom gets accepted to MIT, says the Los Angeles Times, reinscribing the myth of the
American Dream onto the body of a 17-year-old single mother. For these reasons,
educational researchers must learn to recognize ` ` the centrality of the body in reproduction and transformation of culture (Jaggar & Bordo, 1989, p. 4).
For the educational researcher, the inclusion of the body holds the beginnings of
charting new territories in epistemic approaches, where we can begin to develop
strategies to rethink our work in education to re ect the multiplicities of language
and history in less partial and less distorted ways. The body reminds us that it is
critical to acknowledge the self and its locations. How do these locations impact the
directions of critical inquiry? For this argument, this paper is about the acknowledgement of our theoretical mothers and grandmothers, of the recognition of the
lived experience of women and their histories. Too often theory is left without a
body, without an acknowledgement of its origins. For the Chicana educational
researcher, the body is a critical component of the study of agency and empowerment.
Writers such as Gloria Anzaldu a, Cherr e Moraga, and Christine Soto work strategically from peripheral locations that are both inside and beyond the boundaries of
present-day theory. By virtue of their position can the poet and the researcher challenge existing frameworks that are invested in maintaining the academic boundaries
between disciplines and knowledges? The mestiza scholar attends to her research with
the tools of multiple sources and multiple ways of knowing. Mestizaje informs our
choices as researchers and we garner our knowledges through an interrogation of the
lived conditions of our communities. What Moraga and Anzaldu a do best is re ect the
multitude of strategies, methodologies, and approaches to di erent ways of knowing.
Situating knowledge in the brown body begins the validation of the narratives of
survival, transformation , and emancipation of our respective communities, reclaiming
histories and identities. And in these ways, we embody our theory.

References
Anzaldu a, G. (1987). Borderlands/la frontera: The new mestiza. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Press.
Anzaldu a, G. (1990). Haciendo caras, una entrada. In G. Anzaldu a (Ed.), Making face, making soul/haciendo
caras: Creative and critical perspectives by women of color (pp. xv xxviii). San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute
Press.
Bordo, S. (1993). Unbearable weight: Feminism, western culture, and the body. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Collins, P. H. (1990). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. New York:
Routledge.
Denzin, N. (1997). Interpretive ethnography. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Press.
Eagleton, T. (2000). The idea of culture. Oxford, UK/Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Fay, B. (1996). Contemporary philosophy of social science. Oxford, UK/Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Foster, S. L. (1996). Preface. Corporealities. London: Routledge, 1996.
Foucault, M. (1981). The history of sexuality. New York: Vintage Books.
Goodson, I. F. (1998) Storying the self: Life politics and the study of the teacher s life and work. In W. Pinar
(Ed.), Curriculum: Toward new identities (pp. 3 20). New York: Garland Publishing.

toward an epistemology

669

Grosz, E. (1995). Bodies and knowledges: Feminism and the crisis of reason. In E. Grosz, Space, time, and
perversion (pp. 25 45). New York: Routledge.
Harding, S. (1991). Whose science? Whose knowledge? Thinking from women s lives. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press.
Jaggar, A. (1983). Feminist Politics and Human Nature. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld.
Jaggar, A., & Bordo, S. (1989). Introduction. In A. Jaggar & S. Bordo (Eds.), Gender/body/knowledge: Feminist
reconstructions of being and knowing (pp. 1 10) New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University.
McLaren, P. (1993). Schooling as a ritual performance: Towards a political economy of educational symbols and gestures
(2nd ed). New York: Routledge.
Mohanram, R. (1999). Black Body: Women, Colonialism, and Space. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Moraga, C. (1983). Loving in the war years. Boston, MA: South End Press.
Moraga, C. (1993). The last generation: Prose and poetry. Boston, MA: South End Press.
Perez, E. (1999). The decolonial imaginary: Writing Chicanas into history. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press.
Pillow, W. (1997). Exposed methodology: the body as a deconstructive practice. Qualitative Studies In
Education, 10(3), pp. 349 363.
Orellana, M. (1999). Good guys and ` ` bad girls: Identity construction by Latina and Latino student
writers. In M. Bucholtz, A. Liang, & L. Sutton (Eds.), Reinventing identities: The gendered self in discourse
(pp. 64 82). New York: Oxford.
Saldivar-Hull, S. (2000). Feminism on the border: Chicana gender politics and literature. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Sandoval, C. (1995). Feminist forms of agency and oppositional consciousness: US Third World feminist
criticism. In J.K. Gardiner (Ed.), Provoking agents: Gender and agency in theory and practice (pp. 208 226).
Urbana, IL: University of Illinois.
Sedgwick, E. K. (1993). How to bring your kids up gay. In M. Warner (Ed.), Fear of a queer planet: Queer
politics and social theory (pp. 69 81). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.
Shapiro, S. (1994). Re-membering the body in critical pedagogy. Education and Society, 12(1), pp. 61 79.
Simon, R. I., & Giroux, H. (1989). Popular Culture, Schooling, and Everyday Life. Gransby, MASS: Bergin and
Garvey.
Smith, B. (1980). Toward a Black Feminist Criticism. Brooklyn, NY: Out and Out Press.
Soto, C. (2000a). 250 Pounds [poem]. Unpublished manuscript.
Soto, C. (2000b). If you only knew what lies beneath [poem]. Unpublished manuscript.
Spivak, G. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (Eds.) Marxism and the
Interpretation of Culture. (pp. 271 313). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Tanaka, G. (2000). The rst intercultural campus. In The intercultural campus: Transcending culture and power in
American higher education. Peter Lang Publishing (in press).
Tong, R. (1998). Feminist thought. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Turner, B. (1984). Body and society. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell.
Williamson, J. (1986). Consuming passions: The dynamics of popular culture. London: Marion Boyars.
Yabro-Bejarano, Y. (1991). De-constructing the lesbian body: Cherrie Moraga s Loving in the War Years. In
C. Trujillo (Ed.) Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About. (pp. 143 155) Berkeley:
Third Woman Press.